The present invention relates in general to parking guidance in a garage with a powered door closure, and, more specifically, to automatic intervention when a collision between a vehicle and a powered garage door is predicted.
A typical automatic garage door opener has a single optical sensor at the base of the door to detect an obstruction in the pathway of the door during closure. The positioning of the sensor is adequate for detecting a person, pet, or other objects in the path of the garage door which is on or close to the ground surface. Such a sensor is less reliable for detecting a protruding vehicle which has been parked in such a way that the rear tires are outside the detection zone of the optical sensor but the rear bumper or a tailgate of the vehicle is still in the pathway of the garage door. Attempting to close the door in such a scenario can cause the garage door to scrape against the vehicle, causing damage to the body and paint of the vehicle even if the door opener ultimately reverses the closure once resistance from the obstruction is detected.
Garage parking assistance systems are also known which detect when the vehicle has pulled sufficiently far into the garage based on a preset distance from the front of the vehicle a front wall or other landmark in the garage. These systems usually require manual calibration and may be difficult to install. They are also subject to failure modes wherein obstructions in the garage can cause false positives or false negatives. Furthermore, they can only detect the vehicle position and inform the driver of clearance. They can take no further action when a proper parking location is not achieved and the garage door is subsequently closed.
Recent trends have been for vehicle outer dimensions to increase and for the size of the rotation path traversed by an opened tailgate to increase. Thus, the clearance between the path of the garage door and the space occupied by an open tailgate becomes increasingly limited. Therefore, it would be desirable to improve guidance during parking in a garage to avoid interference between any part of a vehicle (including an open tailgate) and an automatic garage door, and to automatically prevent collisions if a vehicle is parked in a position that remains subject to the possibility of an impact by the garage door.